The Magic of Isaldor
Mind Magic: Mind magic allows one to use their mental energy to insert their thoughts and emotions out into the world - whether that be in objects, or into other people’s minds. To use mind magic you need to visualize your thoughts (or the thoughts of someone else) as an extra limb, boring into whatever your target is. Keep in mind that all living beings tend to have a defense of some kind. These defenses can be as simple as having strong mental barriers, or as complex as releasing a mind magic counter attack. Mind magic gets easier with practice, but it requires a lot of concentration. If you fail to maintain absolute concentration while using or casting a spell, the mind magic spell will fail. However, if the target is not resisting or even encouraging the spell, concentration becomes immensely easier. To be able to use any form of mind magic, you must be able to see your target. Mind magic has a reputation for being used to hypnotize or control the mind of others, leading to its questionable legal status in some countries. However, while mind magic can do that, the actual applications of mind magic are many and they can be very productive. Some of the spells include: Telepathy: The most common mind magic spells used (if only because of the Chrail) are ones involving telepathy. While using telepathy, the mage can project their emotions, thoughts, or visual imagery towards their target (or out into space). Sending emotions is quicker and easier than sending worded thoughts, and that’s easier than sending visual imagery. A master of telepathy spells can send out telepathic messages in any voice that they want, including the target’s normal mental voice. The better they are, the less alien these intrusive thoughts will sound. Mind Examination: mind examination is the counterpart to telepathy. It allows you to peer into the mind of another and examine the contents within, check their intentions, and explore their imaginations. While it would be useful for therapists, interrogators and the like, there are several problems with it. The most notable is that mind examination of any caliber is illegal in most countries. Even when it’s not, the (living) target will be able to feel you prying around their mind, and most people have a reflex in which they give a proverbial mental punch to the prier. Even still, the fear of this is so strong that many people take a mental self-defense course Thought/Emotion Extraction: Combining with physical magic, a person is allowed to give their thoughts or emotions a physical or ethereal form. They can even enchant normal objects with these thoughts or emotions. Until the magical charge wears off, these physical items can relay the thought or emotion. A badly made one will spout these thoughts or emotions all the time, while a competently made one can stay silent or release the emotion on cue. Either way, it gives a whole new meaning to the term “mood ring.” Dreamweaving: Like extracting thoughts or emotions, a person can extract dreams. However, it is… quite impossible for someone to extract a dream while dreaming. Dreamweaving requires at least two people: the dreamer and the extractor. The dreamer creates a pleasing dream, and tends to see themselves as a kind of artist, while the extractor pulls the dream out and places it into a stone or a potion or whatever. Keep in note that a the person consuming someone else’s dream will subconsciously change the dream themselves. Dreamweavers do not find themselves responsible for any nightmares their customers may experience. Mind control: There exists many levels of mind control and all of them are considered incredibly taboo. It usually isn’t illegal though because if a mage is powerful enough to control another’s mind, they’re usually too powerful for the law to do much about. The simplest forms of mind control are incredibly complex, imitating the sound of another person’s thoughts and tricking them into thinking the thoughts are their own. True mind control involves boring into someone’s mind while theirs is kicking and flailing, and attempting to hold it still, remembering that mind magic requires a lot of concentration. It is indeed possible, but people find it more likely that a meteor would wipe them all out than being controlled against their will. On the flip side however, people can willingly drop their defenses and allow themselves to be controlled (this is a common practice for actors). Biological hacking: As an extension of mind examination, a master of that can gain access to the feedback of another’s mind. With the right level of skill, they can see what someone else can see, hear what another can hear, etc. This is a very popular tactic in military combat. Mental assault: By using telepathy with the “emotion” of pain, the mind mage can caus another person much mental duress. Familiar Creation: Mind magic is about exerting your mental force onto the physical world, and one of the most complex tasks is creating a familiar of sorts. To describe a familiar is difficult, as they can be whatever their creator wants them to be. They usually take the forms of animals, but can take the forms of people, or completely imaginary beasts. They appear very much like a ghost or a hologram. This is because they are not physical. If it touched you, you’d go right through. What the mind mage has done when creating a familiar is that they have permanently divided their consciousness and mental energy. Familiars can take a month or more of continual focus to build. When their creator dies, the familiar itself dies instantly. However, if the familiar dies the creator lives on, but the energy expended on the familiar is forever gone. And the creator often falls into a kind of depression. Familiars tend to take on their own personality, undetermined directly by the creator. Nothing physical can hurt a familiar, but they are especially vulnerable to mental assaults. The most common cause to the death of a familiar is starvation. Familiars feed off of the mental energy--the focus--of their creator. However, it doesn’t need to be a constant thing. A fully mature familiar can travel a long way from their creator, but once out of range of sight, the creator cannot give his or her own proper focus. Yes people can create a familiar of something like a rock or a glass, but those would provide so few benefits for such a large mental expense that no one would do such a thing (unless someone had a VERY strong need for a non-physical rock that would disappear into the ether if ignored). Emotional Dissipation: Some of the other most popular mind magic spells involve emotional dissipation. It kills thoughts and emotions within your own mind. It’s very popular when it comes to things like removing fear. These spells tend to also work with pain. An amazing mind mage can remove their feelings of pain and keep on fighting, even if they were given a broken leg. People tend to need to be reminded that our emotions and feelings for pain were placed there for a reason. Constantly killing the pain tends to make the source of the pain worse. Amnesia: A mind mage can make themselves forget things on purpose, and they can also remember things that they have forgotten. Most mind mages ignore these spells because it has been known to lead certain people down a never-ending loop of trying to forget something traumatic and then trying to remember what they forgot leading to them trying to forget the thing all over again. Life Magic Life magic sounds like a beautiful thing. It has so many practical applications, such as healing the sick or restoring dead flesh. Unfortunately, there is one magical rule that makes everyone except the darkest of us hesitant to use it: the life energy of the universe will remain constant before and after the spell is cast. This means that if you were to heal a wound, it would require the life energy from the world around the person - usually the caster. When a living being runs out of life energy, they die. More complex creatures have and need more life energy, and as a living being gets older they use life energy far less efficiently. Life energy heals our wounds, keeps us breathing, our heart pumping, and our brain functioning. To cast the spells, mental energy is still needed. All life spells revolve around rearranging life energy, and there is a few ways that this can be done: Altruistic healing: If a magical school will teach any life magic, they will teach this one, even though it too is highly dangerous. Basically what it does is transfer life energy from the caster to the person who needs to be healed. Many, many calculations need to be made. If the wounded person is too wounded, the spell may not only end up killing the caster, but they may end up not healing the wounds enough, allowing them to die too. Altruistic healing is usually done to give people enough time to get to a proper medical doctor. Extraction healing: Like altruistic healing, just the life energy comes from a third party. Using these spells will cause the closest living things around the target to start dying as the target is healed. They could be plants, animals, and other things of those sort. More people would use these kinds of spells on humans or the other sapient species, but sapience requires a lot of life energy. To put it in simple terms, it would take over a million insects to heal a broken bone in a human being. Extraction healing has more purpose as things like pesticides. It’ll bring the plant back to life as it kills the insects that tried to feed off of it. Malicious healing: As a mage can give life energy to another being, they can take life energy from another. It’s a theft that is incredibly vile. And the people who are well practiced in malicious healing are known as harvesters. They end up collecting and kidnapping people to extract their life energy until their victim is as close as death as possible, before waiting for them to heal up and then the process can begin all over again. They tend to employ slavers and mercenaries. Malicious healing is banned almost everywhere that it’s heard of, and it’s even considered a war crime. The honorable mage who wants to harm another (in self-defense or a mage’s duel) will find other means to do so. Rearranging energy: The most common application of life magic is to rearrange the life energy within your own body. It takes away energy from parts of your body that are superfluous at the time and sends them into other areas where they are of more immediate useage. For example, a mage may shut off their digestion to increase their agility or mental focus slightly. Even the most powerful life magic in the world cannot resurrect the dead. Physical Magic The widest variety of spells falls under the banner of physical magic. As per its title, physical magic is about transforming the physical qualities of the world around you. Like the other two types of magic, mental energy is still required. However, the mage Maniforth had discovered a particular rule of physical matter in the world. Despite being capable of being changed “every natural object in the world has an innate desire to return to its natural state.” Items that have been enchanted lose their enchantment over time. Things that have been shapeshifted will return to their original appearance. A skilled mage can make their spells last for quite a long time, however it will always eventually return to its natural state. If a mage continually casts spells to keep the object away from its natural state it will, sometimes violently, explode. Luckily once an object has been returned to its natural state the risk of exploding diminishes. There are a wide variety of spells that the physical mage can cast, and it becomes more of an art than a science. It all depends on the creativity of the mage. Let’s go over some of the spells, starting with some of the most obvious: Explosions: While explosions are often the unintended side effect of a far too ambitious mage, many people will overpower small rocks and get them to unleash explosions. Sometimes for construction and sometimes for war. Because of this, most people need a license to practice physically magic. Enchanting: A physical mage can place a magical charge on any particular item. They can place other spells into rocks, gems, powders (pretty much anything). This is how mind mages get their emotions into certain rocks, but a mage can put pretty much any effect into an object. However they do have a limited charge and they also have an expiration date. Magical storage can last years, but only by the best mages in the world. Buoyancy: Objects can be made lighter or heavier to float or sink… in water, or in air. Shapeshifting: Shapeshifting is a very popular aspect of physical magic and many people dedicate their lives to it. Many young mages dream of being able to sneak around as an animal or another person. However, the risks are great. You need to be able to visualize the target creature entirely to begin with, and there’s always the risk that the shapeshifting spell will wear off at the worst possible opportunity. And you know, if you try to prevent that, you will explode. Concealment: There are many types of concealment that the physical mage can play with. Beyond changing colors to suit their environment, There are some types of sub-invisibility, although true invisibility is impossible. There are spells that can turn a person transparent. There are also spells that can refract light, which seems to be more popular in hiding blemishes than actually sneaking around. Liquification: A mage can change a solid into a liquid or gas or vice-versa, completely at room temperature. However, it is very much recommended that a mage does not cast these spells on himself. When the spell wears off, the mage has a tendency to find their vital organs quite a distance from their bodies. While still incredibly dangerous, it’s much easier to turn yourself into a gel or a slime. Liquification can be made safer while in conjunction with another spell, but combining spells has a tendency to make matter even more unstable. Proceed with caution. Gravity: A mage can increase or decrease an object’s gravitational force. The larger the object originally is and the further away it is, the more strength you’d need. For example, if you wanted to alter the gravity of any of the moons, you would probably knock yourself out. Similarly, the mage can also change something’s weight. Accelerate: A mage can change the natural speed of something. This is usually done after the mage generates some kind of small wind with a fanning motion and sends it straight at their target, allowing the air to start cutting. This is just a small amount of what physical magic can do. Physical magic can rust things, or make them unable to rust. It can make them magnetic. It can things glow. It can make things rubbery, smaller or larger. The true limits, as have been stated, are in the imagination of the caster. This gets even more complicated when said mage brings items into the fray, with things like light-refracting dust or electrically charged arrows. Category:Miscellaneous